Puppy merlin

Puppy merlin

Image by Ninja M.
Merlin, during his puppy uglies stage, sits on top of a play structure in Hathaway Park in Washougal, Wa. This is the second picture I had to take, because the first one was deleted during my Iphone update from Iphone OS 1.2 to 2.0.

What's wrong with this picture? Why is it not *me* walking that cute little dog?

Image by Ed Yourdon
Note: I chose this photo, among the 10 that I uploaded to Flickr on the morning of Jun 10, 2011, as my "photo of the day." To me, it's a good example of someone who knows she's being photographed, even when she can't see the photographer and his camera. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the woman in the red dress is someone who naturally assumes that she's always being photographed, and that she should walk and pose accordingly...

Note: this photo was published in an Jun 10, 2011 issue of Everyblock NYC zipcodes blog titled "10023." It was also published as an illustration in an undated (early May 2012) blog titled "Maltese People," even though the picture is obviously related to Maltese dogs, rather than Maltese people.

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This is a continuation of Flickr sets that I created in 2010 (shown here), 2009 (shown here), and 2008 (shown here) -- which, collectively, illustrate a variety of scenes and people in the small "pocket park" known as Verdi Square, located at 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City's Upper West Side, right by the 72nd St. IRT subway station.

I typically visit a local gym once or twice a week, and I get there by taking the downtown IRT express from my home (at 96th Street) down to the 72nd Street stop. Whenever possible, I try to schedule an extra 30-60 minutes to sit quietly on one of the park benches, and just watch the flow of people coming in and out of the park -- sometimes just passing through, to get from 72nd Street up to 73rd Street, but mostly entering or exiting the subway station.

You see all kinds of people here: students, bums, tourists, office workers, homeless people, retired people, babysitters, children, soldiers, sanitation workers, lovers, friends, dogs, cats, pigeons, and a few things that simply defy description. Sometimes you see the same people over and over again; sometimes they follow a regular pattern at a particular time of the day.

If I focus on the people entering the park at 73rd Street, and walking southwards toward the subway entrance, I typically have five or ten seconds to (a) decide if they're sufficiently interesting to bother photographing,(b) wait for them to get in a position where I can get a clear shot of them, and (c) focus my camera on them and take several shots, in the hope that at least one or two of them will be well-focused and really interesting.

While you might get the impression that I photograph every single person who moves through this park, it's actually just the opposite: the vast majority of people that I see here are just not all that interesting. (It's not that they're ugly, it's just that there's nothing interesting, memorable, or distinctive about them.) Even so, I might well take, say, 200 shots in the space of an hour. But some of them are repetitive or redundant, and others are blurred or out-of-focus, or technically defective in some other way. Of the ones that survive this kind of scrutiny, many turn out to be well-focused, nicely-composed, but ... well ... just "okay". I'll keep them on my computer, just in case, but I don't bother uploading them.

Only about 5% of the photos I've taken get uploaded to Flickr -- e.g., about 10 photos from a one-hour session in which a thousand, or more, people have walked past me. So it is indeed only a tiny, tiny subset of the "real" street scene in New York City. On the other hand, it is reassuring to see that there are at least a few "interesting" people in a city that often has a reputation of being mean, cold, and heartless...

We Wish You An "Ugly" Christmas (And They Mean That In The Nicest Way)

Image by Cayusa
Week 99 Assignment 2 for Take A Class With Dave and Dave.

Cute Puppies, kittens, babies...photos that make you want to barf from the cuteness overload. That's your goal. Make the explore monkeys happy. :)

I've posted pictures of my daughter an awful lot and we don't have a puppy and my cat is far from being a kitten. As cute as I find my daughter and my cat, I just didn't want to go that route. The Uglies have been begging and begging to be in a shot and I find them awful cute so I agreed. It being Christmas, they wanted to a Christmasy picture. I told them to have at it and next thing I know they are all lined up in their Christmas finest.

someones got a case of the uglies

Image by E-Jeezy
lol sorry I'm so mean on here...i just go through all the pictures and type the first thing that comes to mind...i guess im a bad person, but i really dont care ;)

shoe_eating_contest

Image by bermudi
photoshop concoction...carpet is ugly and ruins all my pictures